I keep that can on a shelf in the pantry.
It’s full again. But not with lottery tickets anymore.
It holds a different collection now.
A paper napkin from a boat in Alaska.
A boarding pass. Tulsa to Seattle. Seat 14A. A window seat.
A Christmas card from Linda Hargrove. She sends one every single year. Always with a picture of a ceramic chicken on the front.
A postcard from Dolores, from a trip we took together to see the Christmas lights in Branson.
A crayon drawing from a little girl named Maddie in my Sunday school class. A picture of a woman with gray hair and a great big smile, standing next to a tomato plant almost as tall as she is.
And at the very bottom of the can, the first ticket.
The one from March of 2007.
The one I wrote on at the kitchen table, with a pen from the junk drawer, while my husband laughed at me. With a promise I’d never said out loud to anybody.
It’s faded now. The printed numbers on the front are almost gone.
But on the back, in a young woman’s blue ballpoint pen, it’s still legible. Still steady.
This ticket belongs to Patricia Ann Dunn, who paid for it with her own money, on her own Friday, and who will not be sharing it with anyone who laughed.
Some quiet evenings, after supper, I take it out of the can. I read it under the kitchen light.
And I smile.
Because I know something now that I didn’t know then.
For nineteen years, I thought that sentence was a warning. A little line in the sand. Something to keep a man from taking what was mine.
It wasn’t a warning.
It was a love letter.
Written by a tired woman at a kitchen table in Oklahoma.
To the woman she was going to become.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.